How ID'ing Texas remains could aid Phila.
Authorities feel new technology could solve missing-person cases

By BOB WARNER

IN MAY 1993, a work crew was clearing land for a new fence at a Halliburton research facility, just south of Alvarado, Texas, when one of the men noticed something out of place.

In a brushy, wooded area just off a service road for Interstate 35W, he saw what appeared to be a human skull, and next to it, some other bones, a faded blouse and jewelry. The remains had been there so long, a brierwood bush was growing through the blouse.

The Johnson County medical examiner's office did what it could, determining that the remains belonged to a young woman, between 16 and 27 years old, anywhere from 5 feet 4 to 5 feet 9 inches tall.

"We theorized she'd been out there about 10 years," said Sgt. David Cole, lead homicide investigator for the Johnson County Sheriff's Office.

There were no further clues to the woman's identity, and Johnson County had no missing-person reports that matched the bones.

The skeleton was kept at the medical examiner's office until a visiting fire inspector declared the bones a bio-hazard, and ordered them destroyed.

Instead, one of the nurses hid them in a box and stuck it under a cabinet in a storage area.

"She just said, 'We're not getting rid of these,' and she kept every bone we had recovered," Cole said.

Thanks to one stubborn nurse - plus dedicated investigators and the relentless growth of technology - those bones eventually gave up their identity - but it took another 10 years.

In mid-2004, DNA research and a fledgling national database of DNA profiles made it possible to link the Alvarado bones to a 19-year-old Texas woman who had disappeared in 1982, more than a decade before her skeleton was discovered.

Authorities believe the same technology could help Philadelphia and other jurisdictions deal with some of their longest-running mysteries - thousands of unidentified human remains and tens of thousands of missing-person cases that have kept families in limbo for years.

Two recent cases have focused attention on Philadelphia's problems in this area. Two badly decomposed bodies lay unidentified in the city morgue for months - in one case, more than two years - at the same time that the respective families had filed missing-person reports with the Philadelphia Police Department and had tried to publicize their searches.

National authorities say there are similar problems throughout the country. To deal with them, support is developing for a strong national reporting system for missing persons, coupled with a national database of DNA profiles, covering unidentified remains, missing persons and their relatives.

"What's going on in Philadelphia is not an isolated situation," says Bill Hagmaier, a 24-year FBI veteran who heads the International Homicide Investigators Association, a Virginia-based group of police officers and prosecutors who deal with murder cases. "This is a silent crisis for the whole nation... . We have about 40,000 unidentified dead in the United States, and they are not getting the attention they deserve."

The Bush administration has committed $1 billion over five years to upgrade DNA testing at laboratories around the country and to promote its use throughout the criminal-justice system.

One component of "The President's DNA Initiative," announced in March 2003, is to "ensure that DNA forensic technology is used to its full potential to solve missing-persons cases and identify human remains."

A national DNA database, initially created by the FBI in 1998 to handle DNA samples from convicted criminals and crime scenes, has been expanded to include DNA profiles from unidentified remains, missing persons and relatives of missing persons.

So far, the expansion into missing-person cases has been slow.

The FBI has collected DNA profiles from 2.7 million convicted offenders and from 125,000 crime scenes, but as of this week the database includes DNA data from only 244 missing persons, 319 unidentified remains and 719 relatives of missing persons.

"The missing-persons part of the database is really in its infancy," said Dr. Tom Callaghan, the molecular biologist who is official "custodian" of the FBI's National DNA Index System.

So far, very little of the missing-persons data has come out of Pennsylvania.

The state police DNA laboratory, in Greensburg, Pa., has forwarded to the FBI just 16 DNA profiles of unidentified remains or missing persons. The laboratory director, Christine Tomsey, said it was possible that additional Pennsylvania profiles have made their way to the FBI through out-of-state labs.

At least 11 more Pennsylvania cases may be headed to the FBI database through Fort Worth, where the University of North Texas has established one of the nation's top DNA labs.

David Quain, chief investigator for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, said he was arranging to send tissue samples to the Fort Worth lab from three unidentified corpses discovered in Philadelphia over the past 14 months.

If that goes smoothly, Quain said, he'll follow up with eight more cases, going back to 2002. The service is free to the city, its costs covered by a federal grant to the University of North Texas.

The same DNA testing services are available to the Philadelphia Police Department to help with its missing-person cases.

But that list is so voluminous - 400 or 500 cases, according to Chief Inspector Joseph P. Fox, in charge of all the city detective divisions - that authorities would not know where to begin.

"The reality is for us, even to consider collecting the DNA from 500 cases would be a very, very time-consuming thing," Fox said. "If you thought the person was dead or had run into foul play, then you might think it was appropriate [to do a DNA test]... . But I would say the vast majority of them [the 500 missing-persons cases] are healthy and wise, wherever they are, of their own free will."

Texas has long been ahead of the curve in applying DNA research to missing-person cases.

In 2001, the Texas legislature allocated $665,000 to start a program at the University of North Texas - a missing-persons database that would include the results of DNA testing.

UNT's Health Science Center had already been using DNA analysis to run paternity tests and to screen for genetic diseases.

Under the new program, it began running DNA tests on unidentified human remains, the personal effects of missing persons, and tissue samples collected from the parents of missing persons.

Sgt. Cole mentioned the new DNA testing system one day on a visit to the medical examiner's office. One of the nurses overheard, and volunteered the bones that she'd hidden years earlier.

Within days, Cole was driving to the DNA lab in Fort Worth with a quiet passenger, the skeleton.

Independently, about 50 miles away, a police detective in North Richland Hills, Rica Garcia, decided to look at some old missing-person cases.

One of them was Donna Lisa Williamson, a 19-year-old woman living with her parents who had disappeared more than 20 years earlier.

Williamson, who sold kitchen knives as an independent saleswoman, was last reported seen alive after spending a night at a girlfriend's apartment, in August 1982. Her car was found two days later, parked at a Fort Worth motel.

Detective Garcia heard about the DNA program at North Texas, located Williamson's mother in Florida and arranged for the mother to send a DNA sample - actually, just a cotton swab swirled around the inside of the mother's mouth, known as a buckle sample.

That too went to the Fort Worth DNA lab. It yielded a DNA typing that was consistent with the DNA found in the Alvarado remains - not an exact match, since scientists were comparing DNA taken from two individuals, but consistent with one person being related to the other.

That was enough evidence for authorities in Johnson County and Richland Hills to take closer looks at their files for both the Alvarado remains and the Donna Williamson case.

Cole had heard of the Williamson case before.

Her age, build, and the time frame of her disappearance were consistent with the bones found outside Alvarado. But when investigators had compared the skeleton with dental records, it was a mismatch.

Last year, prompted by the DNA link, the investigators took a closer look.

And inside their own files, they found that someone had made an error. A dental X-ray of Donna Williamson's jaw had been mistakenly reversed, leading authorities to think they were looking at the right side of her jaw when it was actually the left.

When the X-ray was flipped, it matched the Alvarado jaw exactly, confirming that the remains were Williamson's.

Her ashes were scattered on the water of the Gulf of Mexico, after a family ceremony on the Florida Panhandle.

"She loved the water, as I do, and this was our way of saying goodbye to Donna," said her mother, Linda Williamson, in a telephone conversation this week.

She said she was grateful to the police who had finally identified her daughter, after 22 years of uncertainty.

"We know she came to a bad end. That's hard to take," Williamson said. "But at least we know. It has meant a great deal of peace to me and my family."